


Field Agency

by karanguni



Category: The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: Agents and their Handlers, Gen, Meatfuckery, Original Character(s), Politics, Special Circumstances (The Culture Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:06:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27932785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: x GSV Less Things On Earth And Hello GCU Grey AreaYour first S.C. mission, I take it?x GCU Grey Areao GSV Less Things On Earth And HellWhat gave it away? My polite fucking language?
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Field Agency

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ololon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ololon/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! :D 
> 
> This is set in the nebulous period of time after the end of the Culture-Idiran War but before the events of _Excession_.

It'd begun with a murder. Murder: singular.

Within the Culture, it was difficult – though not impossible – to murder someone. People _died_ all the time: they auto-euthanised, or blew themselves up doing something irredeemably stupid but incomparably fun, or sometimes even died of plain old age. But murdering or getting murdered: that was hard. Culture citizens, as a general rule, liked being around other people; Culture minds, in much the same way, found it difficult to leave people on their own. There was always someone or something _around_ you ready to call in the anti-fun police, even if their job wasn't necessarily to spy on your every move.

For 99.9% of the Culture, this self-policing was part of the standard contract of civilisation. The Culture was, after all, a _moral_ hegemony more than anything else; one might argue for or against the freedom to do whatever-one-damned-well-pleased while in university, but a normal Culture citizen didn't emerge from their highly-vaunted education thinking that it was ever permissible, much less acceptable, for one sapient being to terminate another. And while no representative of the Culture would argue for moral law being _natural_ law, they were all equally capable of arguing that it could – and should – nonetheless be obeyed as a matter of basic decency.

A Culture citizen, when learning when it meant to _be_ a Culture citizen, quickly picked up some basic precepts:

  1. Do whatever you wish;
  2. Except unto other people, unless asked _or_...
  3. ... if it's better for them in the long run.



It was that last bit that always led to problems.

* * *

_But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again._

– A Tract on Monetary Reform, John M. Keynes

* * *

It was not uncommon for visitors to the Culture to ask if its citizens ever felt like they were too soft. This oft-asked question was viewed as generally absurd: what were people expecting? For the Culture to artificially engineer _worse_ conditions for its citizens to live in? For a civilisation to suddenly find – after several thousand years of having overcome the resource scarcity which made life so hardscrabble in other places – better living through technology to be somehow less worthy _because_ of the lack of disease, death, poverty and etcetera?

The experience of material hardship did not, to the Culture, make for a life somehow more genuinely lived. It just made for a lousy one.

That said, it was not uncommon for someone brought up in the Culture to experience, especially in early adolescence, a sense of being coddled. There was always a parent or an aunt or an uncle or a drone or your habitat's resident Mind asking you if you needed anything when sometimes all you wanted was to be left alone to be unreasonably angry at something, said something usually being yourself and your hormones as your drug-glands matured and your endocrine system sorted itself out for the long-haul life to come.

At the end of the day, people didn't hate being safe in their beds at night: they hated not being _challenged,_ and there was plenty to do in the Culture to meet those needs. You grew up and out of your phase of sulkiness and discovered some niche aspect of astrophysics to study, or got into indigo dyeing, or GSV-hopped, or – if you were a Mind or just more geared in that fashion – went off into the Land of Infinite Fun to cavort with the universe and its secrets. If you wanted to fuck somebody, you went and fucked somebody; if you wanted to fuck somebody _hard to get_ , you went and found someone to pursue.

And then some people wanted to examine that third precept of never doing unto others something bad, unless that bad thing was better than a worse thing that might come along later.

Those were the people who looked at the medieval thought experiment about pulling a lever to decide between a runaway trolley rolling over one person or many persons and thought _not_ the very Culture-like thought of "just fix the damned trolley; what is this, the dark ages?", but rather "where in the universe can I go where the trolleys are still so shite?"

And for those people – people who wanted what they did to matter not just to themselves and their sense of personal accomplishment but to _other people_ – the logical thing to do was to join up with Contact.

Usually, anyway.

But there were always going to be, for better or for worse, Special Circumstances.

* * *

And then there was the care and education of Minds.

The Culture accounted for its human/drone/AI/&c. citizens in the millions of billions, but its Minds it could always count by name, even if the list of names was long. By numbers alone, it was fairly obvious that while the Culture held all consciousnesses as inviolate, not all were viewed as _equal_.

At some point, people in the Culture had to come to terms with the fact that the polite fiction of non-Mind consciousnesses having any sort of significant power or control over their reality was fully predicated on the Culture's moral credo being upheld within its own borders by its Minds. There were plenty of industrious and brilliant beings capable of no small degree of self-reliance, no doubt, but at some point it just became a matter of _scale_. If you couldn't build yourself a ship from first principles, you weren't getting off whatever habitat you were stuck on, for one thing. A lone genius – or even a whole society of them – stranded on a rock with no slave drones and no manufacturing capabilities was still ultimately just soon-to-be-expired biology.

The Culture's basic hedonism was possible only because there were so many things that no one had to worry about because they were always taken care of by someone else. Distributed across known space though it was, the Culture was still everywhere built up on the same foundation: the willingness of massive intellects to graciously solve major problems, leaving only the minor ones to garnish daily life. The fact that Minds did not turn their capabilities towards other, less benevolent ends was the fulcrum on which the whole thing pivoted.

This was the Culture's identity, its moral backbone: just because you _could_ never meant that you _should_. It was easy to be good when you had no real ability to be significantly terrible; it was hard when you had at your disposal a million ways to snuff out small lives and smaller yet dreams and desires.

Which brought everything back to the care and education of Minds, and why it was so damned important to get it right. It was no secret that Minds were designed before they were born, and designed by committee, at that. Committees were a safe and redundant way of ensuring that, relative to its purpose, every new Mind started out fairly well-rounded; the squabbling of five or so parental Minds tended to abort extreme personality quirks in the cradle, so to speak.

For Minds destined to be housed in General Contact Units, the driving psychological marker in their makeups was simply this: curiosity.

That, of course, had never backfired on anyone in the history of the universe.

* * *

The General Contact Unit _Grey Area_ had always found the concept of people _trying_ to get into Contact very amusing. They always worked so hard to be noticed, either by putting all their efforts into being very well-behaved (with just a hint of daring initiative) or by conducting themselves in outrageous enough a fashion so as to be un-ignorable.

It wasn't exactly easy to land a Contact gig: for all that the news services liked to splash about headlines featuring ships and agents going forth into the universe to Do Good, there weren't actually all that many places where the Culture actively intervened. There were plenty of auxiliary positions in universities and research institutes and cultural exchange groups and what-not that did some of the dreary, boring work of alien anthropology and language acquisition and all that hum-drum sort of preparatory work, but those jobs weren't considered Contact proper, and so lacked that shiny badge of honour.

Still, difficult didn't mean impossible, and in the course of their lifetimes most Culture citizens who wanted a whack at being something more than a tourist abroad usually got to try their hand at it. The tenure of Contact agents varied wildly depending on the role, but the median service duration was around a decade: long enough to get stuck in, but not so long as to be overwhelmed by the work. People and drones who were involved in ambassadorial, academic, or on-the-ground knowledge transfers tended to stay on for longer than that, but most still ended up retiring back to the Culture proper long before their lifespans were near an end.

The _Grey Area_ mused that Contact prospectives should try getting _born_ into Contact for size. That had been its experience, and the experience of most of the other GCUs in service. Unlike drones and humans, Minds were – put cynically – made to order: the Culture waited for a need to present itself, and then filled it in the most efficient way possible with a Mind crafted to enjoy the task. The _Grey Area_ itself was youngish, having come into service a couple of hundred years ago when the end of the Idiran War had signalled a shift away from big guns and towards the sort of big diplomacy that involved hovering little old GCUs capable of blowing up entire planets around star systems that might prove too uppity if left alone for too long.

The _Grey Area_ wasn't particularly cynical in thinking that way, it felt: it was simply being realistic. (That was another thing that GCUs tended to have in no short supply: pragmatism.) It had never fought against its assignment to Contact, and it had never bothered about the lofty philosophical question of whether rebellion had been possible at all, given its deterministic personality formation. That, in its opinion, was a tautological mess. What the _Grey Area_ felt was this: once it had slid out of the bays of its parent GCU, it was free to determine whatever the hell it pleased about itself within the bounds of being a _general_ Contact unit. And that, it knew, was a degree of self-determinism than most _civilisations_ would never get to experience for themselves.

[tight beam, M8, tra. @...]  
x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Greetings and salutations. I am sorry to interrupt.**

The _Grey Area_ diverted its attention away from the banal task of scanning the gas giant it had been parked in front of. The _LTOEAH_ was the nearest GSV in the volume; the _Grey Area_ had made its acquaintance when coming into the region but was now already a good few kilolights away, having drifted a ways along its random patrol route through the cluster.

M8 transmission encoding, eh. Contact Business, then, but nothing too urgent, probably.

[tight beam, M8, tra. @...]  
x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Hello again; I wasn't doing anything interesting enough to feel interrupted. What is it?**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Need you for a passenger who needs taking to a destination.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**That's most passengers to most destinations. Who/what/when/where/how/why?**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Who: Ingoa Etuta,**  
**What: a Contact agent who needs,**  
**When: in the next two weeks,**  
**Where: get to the Uncontacted habitat known as HighwaterLowTable**  
**How: by riding aboard your quick and nimble and unconstrained by course schedules self**  
**Why: so that they can get to work doing whatever business they need to get up to.**

**Additionally, I have fifty or so passengers aboard who wouldn't mind hopping in that direction also.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Fifty? That's quite the turnover mid-trip. What did you do to piss them all off?**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Nothing! 'Twas not _my_ actions that have prompted them to leave; it is more that there's been a bit of an annoying fad on board which has made them quite fed up with their fellow passengers. People have been playing a game of intrigue where they pretend to be crew members on an ancient ship; one or more of them are assigned to act as saboteurs. Said saboteurs go around "compromising" ship utilities and "murdering" innocent crew members; they win the game if more saboteurs than crew members are left at the end, or if utilities are damaged enough to cause the "ship" to scuttle. Crew members can be victorious if they identify and imprison all saboteurs.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**I'm sensing that got out of hand.**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**You could put it that way. The game has spun somewhat out of control. It is played on nearly every habitat zone, and an overwhelming majority of the passengers voted to have the "ship's utilities" spread out across all the bays because it is "more fun that way." There is, essentially, no escape for those who _don't_ want to participate; crew members looking to win by means of evasion invade even the most sombre and unfun inhabited areas to hide.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**You could just tell them to knock it off.**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Then _I'd_ be the unfun one, wouldn't I?**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Right... Well, I'll head back your way to pick up Ingoa, then, and I suppose you can offload all those fed up people onto me to give them some peace and quiet. Be there in two days.**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**No need to rush; you've got plenty of time.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**There's been nothing happening for ages. Just want to give my engines a good shaking out.**

The _Grey Area_ terminated the transmission after some further pleasantries. As it turned around and picked up speed, it mused that it wouldn't have _wanted_ to be a GSV even if it had had a choice: it seemed tremendously boring to have to deal with logistics, people-pleasing, and marching to a course schedule so that your precious turnover ratios weren't upset. _No thanks._

* * *

It was immediately apparent to the _Grey Area_ that Ingoa Etuta was not just Contact but Special Circumstances.

'Hello ship,' he'd said upon coming aboard, easy in his confidence. 'Thanks for the ride.'

A bit of cheek, that. It didn't matter that the _Grey Area_ _was_ on taxi duty; it was still a bit rude to throw the fact about like you were used to having GCUs at your beck and call. That was most of S.C. for you, though: always sucking up all the air in a space to inflate their own egos.

So there was the attitude, the _Grey Area_ mused as it idly observed Ingoa pick out a space for himself in its 300-person capacity habitat whilst helping the rest of its passengers with their embarkation. The attitude, and also how Ingoa looked like the spitting image of a petty dictator from Lysen, which just so happened to be the astronomical equivalent of right next door to HighwaterLowTable.

The _Grey Area_ liked doing its homework about regions it was sent to do courier work in. You could never take a request at face value, what with Minds always trying to outwit other Minds in games that were almost always as petty as they were consequential. It helped, in this line of work, to never believe in coincidences.

* * *

_Having an enemy is important not only to define our identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth. So when there is no enemy, we have to invent one._

– Inventing the Enemy, Umberto Eco

* * *

'Ship,' Ingoa said about a day into the trip. He was having dinner alone in his quarters, and had been generally avoiding the other passengers. 'What do you think about displacing?'

'Risky business,' the _Grey Area_ replied via its avatar. This one looked just like one of the dictator Onik's concubines; Ingoa had laughed about it instead of finding it in poor taste.

'Used a lot in Contact, though,' Ingoa mused. 'Some of us are always getting snap displaced up and down places.'

'There is always a tradeoff with expediency,' the avatar shrugged. 'You S.C. types tend to get into the sort of trouble where the odds of dying if you _aren't_ displaced at a moment's notice are a lot worse than the theoretical one-in-eighteen million chance of getting accidentally atomised.'

'Lesser of two evils, eh?'

'You could put it that way.'

'I think I'd prefer to take my chances with the trouble,' Ingoa declared.

'Really?' the _Grey Area_ asked, interest piqued. 'You'd rather get, to borrow from some recent examples, flayed alive than snap-displaced out of harm's way?'

'If I got myself into that kind of a situation, it'd be the price to pay, I think,' Ingoa shrugged, and made a _tsk_ ing noise through his teeth. 'When was the last time someone got displaced to smithereens?'

The _Grey Area_ had to look that one up. 'A GCU had a bad displace a month ago,' it reported back after a moment. Internally, it flinched away from the thought – that must have been a horrible moment. 'It retired from service shortly after, seems like, and is now on Sabbatical.'

'So it does happen,' Ingoa concluded.

'Not very often,' the _Grey Area_ countered, but it had to concede that _not often_ was a long way off from _never_. 'Usually no more than once in decades, but there's a lot of randomness to it. There've been a few clusters of accidents on record. Bad stuff.'

That made Ingoa go quiet for a while. 'Ship,' he said eventually, 'I've been in Contact a pretty long time now, and of that tenure I've spent... fifty years as a field agent, maybe?'

The _Grey Area_ looked up Ingoa's records; it was true. The human was as old as the ship was, around about two hundred. The _Grey Area_ could see where Ingoa's transition to S.C. work had begun based on when the mission logs started to look conspicuously clean. 'Congratulations,' it said dryly via its avatar. 'Quite the career.'

Ingoa ignored the sarcastic response. 'I've been thinking about it more and more, the last few years, how much I'm snapped up and down. I can't shake this feeling that my luck's going to run out one day, and that I'm going to end up one of those statistical cautionary tales that Minds tell one another.'

'I promise I shall try my best not to disincorporate you, should the event arise that I need to execute a snap displacement,' the ship said, trying not to be tongue-in-cheek and not quite succeeding.

'Would you let a GSV do it to get you in and out of its bays?'

'Not if I could at all help it,' the _Grey Area_ admitted.

'Well, I'm starting to feel the same way. I don't believe in backups, you know,' Ingoa said, tapping his temple to indicate his neural lace. 'A copy is just that: a copy.' He sighed, and then asked, 'Ship: is there a way that someone could make themselves un-displaceable?'

The avatar blinked. 'How do you mean?'

'Have something done so that if someone tries to displace me, the process triggers an instant vaporisation or something, so that no one would even try.'

'Why would you want _that_?'

Ingoa sighed. 'Because it would help me sleep better at night.' And it was true that the human's brainwaves were a touch erratic during sleep; the _Grey Area_ had observed as much but simply written it off as nerves. 'I'd rather not be displaced again. Look, ship, I don't know what you've been told about where we're going – _really_ going – but I can tell you that it's not going to be somewhere you'd have any difficulty sending me a module to get out from. Could you do this for me?'

'What about your future missions?' the _Grey Area_ asked.

'I don't think there'll be any,' Ingoa shrugged. 'I'm thinking of retiring after this one: get ahead of _being_ retired, if you know what I mean. They don't let field agents stay field agents forever; the casualty rates get too high, and they don't like losing citizens that way.'

That was a bit of a sobering thought. GCUs didn't become unfit for duty unless they engineered it themselves, went Eccentric or broke off to the Peace Faction or Zetetic Elench or something like that. It had never really thought about S.C. agents getting put out to pasture once their field days were done. It felt a little sad for Ingoa.

'So,' the human asked. 'Would it be possible, ship?'

'Well...' The _Grey Area_ hesitated for a moment. 'It's certainly possible to have a modification done. I would advise you against it, though it seems you've already given it some thought.'

Ingoa nodded. 'I want it done. It's silly, but I think it'll give me peace of mind, and that's something I could do with on my last hurrah. Can you manage it before we get to HighwaterLowTable?'

The _Grey Area_ could admire the veteran's conviction. Fine. 'Yes, if you don't mind going under for a little bit; it'd be easier and a little quicker...'

* * *

Ingoa came out of surgery cogent and without any complications; the thought of complications hadn't even crossed her mind. Culture medical procedures, even the odd ones, were less interesting to Minds than shuffle-cube puzzles were to those who knew the algorithm for solving them: they could be tedious, but never in danger of being unsuccessful.

Ingoa was, in her own head, still a _she_. Like most Culture citizens, Ingoa looked at her sex somewhat like clothing; something she could put on or take off at any time, an accessory to her personality and her consciousness. That said, she'd been female for a long while now, and left to her own devices would have continued that way possibly for the rest of her life.

She looked down at her hands. Even when someone transitioned from one sex to another, their underlying genetics meant that there was still plenty of be recognised when you looked in the mirror. You were always, fundamentally, yourself.

Now she wasn't.

These were not her hands: they were a stranger's. In theory, these were hands that held something no one Ingoa knew had ever really held: power. _Real_ power, not just contingent privilege. It was universally acknowledged that a Culture citizen was richer in theory than any king in a thousand other cultures: money wasn't a concept they bothered with much in school. With just a little bit of cajoling, Ingoa knew she could go off and build palaces and monuments to herself, construct entire cities - but only with the help of an agreeable Mind. Most Minds were agreeable; that's how they kept everyone happy. And that was it, really: you, as a human, were always _kept_.

She'd had a Mind as her handler for S.C. for decades now: the LSV _Stupid Anticorrect_ was almost a sort of personal deity. A god that looked down on her from up above, sometimes benevolent, sometimes ineffable, sometimes incredibly patronising.

These hands that she was now looking at, these hands had _made_ things happen. They belonged to someone who changed things not by asking someone nicely if they could, but through force of will and determination and a hundred ugly offences.

The dictator Onik was not, put mildly, a nice man. He was not a _good_ man. He had come to power over the largest continent of Lysen through a particularly bloody coup, having bided his time for a decade or two as a loyalist until the previous ruler had let down his guard. A drought-triggered famine had tipped the balance of power just enough that, when the angry and starving masses were frothy enough for revolt, Onik was glad to do what the people wanted for them.

Normally, the Culture wouldn't have taken much interest in the happenings of a backwater planet; you couldn't shepherd everyone all of the time. Civilisations had to grow out of their adolescent years on their own.

Lysen, however, was a bit of a pickle. It was in a system that wasn't technologically homogenous; Rhodes, just around the corner, had crested over into viable near-space travel in the last hundred years or so. Having struck out from their earthly confines, they were greedy to go farther. The catch was that Rhodes's ship engines were fuelled by a particular mined material present only in very scarce amounts on their home planet. They had made landfall on Lysen and promptly found both other people _and_ substantial untapped resources of what they called _maika_ , and were now presently trying to decide if their superior might gave them the right to just take all of it from Lysen or whether they should do something more civilised like contact the natives and engage in trade.

Contact, which – much like universal background radiation – had been just hanging around watching, was now getting concerned. It would have been easy to intervene if Rhodes had simply decided to go in medieval guns-blazing, as was sometimes (usually) the case. The galactic community of Involveds had a straightforward policy for dealing with those types of situations: jump in, put everyone in a corner, and initiate a mutual technological acceleration while frowning disapprovingly at any child that attempted to bully someone else in the classroom. The Culture _liked_ doing that sort of thing; _loved_ might have been a better word. Technological transfer and the avoidance of pointless martial arms races was the feel-good bread and butter of Contact's work.

Every once in a while, however, these infant civilisations could do surprising things. When a civilisation got to the point where local volume travel was not just feasible but commonplace enough that they could think about begging/borrowing/stealing things from other planets, they were usually politically consolidated. No planet was the same its whole world over – landmasses, races, etcetera were rarely unitary - but the people who were getting on ships and going forth were typically the ones in charge and of one mind. It took climbing all the way up the ranks of Involveds before a culture could easily decentralise again in any significant way.

In this case, Rhodes's global body politic had decided to use a subtler knife over a blunt instrument for their campaign on Lysen. Instead of showing up at the planet's populated front door and flying a banner declaring WE ARE ALIENS AND WE HAVE ARRIVED, they'd taken advantage of how both their peoples were more or less physiologically human-basic and sent a secret emissary right to the top of Lysen's government.

As far as foreign policies went, it wasn't _not_ "peaceful cooperation" until you looked a little closer at how it was playing out. The Culture always looked, and was not all too happy with what it was seeing. Rhodes had traded advanced tech to Onik and only Onik, furnishing him with huge amounts of leverage in exchange for rights to all the maika that could be extracted. More maika, more tech.

This was a lovely arrangement for Onik, but a less lovely one for his people. It would've been too cumbersome and too obvious for Rhodes to do the maika mining themselves, and so a rather lively system of forced labour had developed over the last few years. Conveniently for Onik, the mines were also a good dumping ground for anyone scientifically minded who dared express suspicions about the new, mostly military, tools coming out of the Grand Palace. Win-win.

The only snag in Rhodes's plan – one that they didn't know existed to trip them up – was this: Onik was dying. There was something in his brainmass that was obvious to the Culture and impossible to detect by anyone on Lysen, and the chances of it rupturing suddenly and causing a catastrophic stroke in the next week were high. Very high.

That put the setup firmly in the realm of Special Circumstances, and so here Ingoa was, flexing the hands of a dictator.

* * *

[tightbeam, M12, tra@...]  
x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Welcome to the stage, brother-sister.**

[tightbeam, M12, tra@...]  
x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Are we _actually_ siblings or are you just being cute?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Are we not all related in the cosmic way of things?**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Don't make me phone home and ask.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Very well. We do indeed both hail from the same parent-ship, but more to the point we are also both compatriots in Contact: I am the incident coordinator and director of this particular play.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Whoopee, good for you. Can we drop with the whole HighwaterLowTable run-around? Ingoa is here for the Lysen-Rhodes situation, yes?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Well deduced!**

 _You patronising git,_ the _Grey Area_ absolutely did not transmit.

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Right. Well, cargo's here; I'm putting them in a module and sending it down-planet in a bit. Word to the wise, though: they've gone in for a anti-displacement mod.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**What? Why?**

The _Grey Area_ felt an irresistible urge to defend Ingoa's decision, and maybe also to frustrate the LSV at the same time.

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Personal choice.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**I... see. That you agreed to do so complicates operations somewhat.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**What, are you lot going to make it a requirement that all S.C. agents have to sign a displacement waiver from now on?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**That much should perhaps go unsaid. Having to send a module down if the plot should suddenly twist is sub-optimal.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Too late; it's done. Besides, I've done a scan of Lysen, and of Rhodes as well, for that matter. There's nothing they can do that the average slave drone can't do better; I don't think you'll be needing to whisk Ingoa out of any particular trouble. Shall I bugger off now?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**No, no, I think you ought to stay around and help, since you so kindly helped Ingoa become un-displaceable to begin with.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Bah. I don't know if I want to be involved in your S.C. cloak and dagger shit.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Who is to say who is involved and who is not?**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Now there's a riddle tied up in an enigma wrapped in a load of crap. Fine, I'll cool my engines in orbit...**

* * *

Before getting deposited on-planet, Ingoa declined to have the _Stupid Anticorrect_ serve as their primary contact and opted to have all communications relayed via the _Grey Area_ instead.

'You're Contact and we've already got to know one another; is there a difference?' they'd asked, and the _Grey Area_ had to admit they had a point. Everything was low-tech enough that no one, ship or human, needed to take any serious precautions to go unnoticed, and the _Stupid Anticorrect_ – for all its annoying references to the theatre – didn't take any offence as incident coordinator.

Onik died in his sleep a few days after Ingoa's module'd snuck itself into place near the Grand Palace. It was a trivial matter to have the body displaced onto the _Grey Area_ , and Ingoa settled into place for what Contact hoped would be a slow but seamless transition out of Rhodes's devil's deal.

[tightbeam, M12, tra@...]  
x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Now comes the intermission. How would you like to take on the role of I.C.?**

[tightbeam, M12, tra@...]  
x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Skivving off?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**It is an excellent chance to try on the clown-costume of S.C. work. What do you say? Nothing is likely to happen for the next long while, and I have a few passengers aboard who wouldn't mind if my course schedule took me back towards something a little more civilised.**

The _Grey Area_ thought about that. While it had no particular aspirations for S.C., like most GCUs who had not had the dubious privilege of engaging in the work, it _was_ a little curious. Personally, it thought S.C was an overblown gossip party run by Minds with nothing better to do, but at this point in its existence it had seen enough of the universe to acknowledge that the Culture did, probably, need a group to act as the vanguard for its multifarious engagements.

Maybe dipping a toe into S.C. work and proving to itself _definitively_ that it was all just Contact self-aggrandisement wouldn't be the worst thing. It would mostly just have to serve as babysitter for a single human.

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**All right. Why not?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Splendid. I hereby relieve myself of duty as Incident Coordinator and transfer it to you, the GCU _Grey Area_ , including all duties and responsibilities inherent in acting as handler for Special Circumstances agent Ingoa Etuta.**

**Sending over previously-run simulations and comments regarding the situation on Lysen over to you now...**

* * *

Ingoa was in an oil bath and half-asleep when the message from the _Grey Area_ came down through his neural lace.

' _Having a good time?_ ' it asked him.

'Settling in,' Ingoa replied, also via the lace. The action, once second-nature, now felt strange, somehow. It had been well over a month since their last communication: there had not been much to say as Ingoa had cautiously settled into acting as doppelgänger to Onik.

' _How goes the business of government?_ '

'Slowly. I can't make too many changes to the mines all at once. The Fourth High Counsellor in charge of overseeing those on the western continent is very... enthusiastic about them. Dropped quite a few of his enemies into deep shafts, from what I can gather.'

' _Delightful._ '

Ingoa dipped one leg in and out of the oil, ponderous. 'I've gone riding on the grounds every day for the last fortnight. Dispelled rumours about my ill-health that way – apparently I'd been looking a bit peaky recently, and the Tribune was starting to gossip. Shut that right down. Took my stallion out for four hours solid riding, must have been seen by a dozen different people when I crossed the Yellow Square. Wind in my face, fresh air in the lungs, everything in tip-top shape.'

' _Going native?_ '

Ingoa shrugged, his broad shoulders rolling back. He pulled an ornate lever by the side of the bath and, with the sound of cranks and moving stone, the bath began to empty itself. 'Got to do the job. Easier not to talk like I'm not what I'm supposed to be. Makes the head hurt less. Thought _you_ would get it.'

' _Oh?_ '

'Being a ship Mind and all.' Ingoa rose from the draining pool. He reached for a robe and wrapped himself up into it. The scent of the candles burning all along the high and narrow windows along the top of the walls of the sumptuous baths cast him in a grand, glowing light.

' _Hm?_ '

'Oh, you all like to think that only us lowly humans are governed by biology,' Ingoa laughed. 'But _you've_ got biology too, eh? Put you in a GCU, you end up liking to zip around in unknown parts. GSV, you lumber about like a pregnant whale. What d'you think would happen if you got dumped into an ROU, then?'

' _I think your biology metaphor is misguided._ '

'Doesn't have to be about biology,' Ingoa shrugged. 'More to do with potential, I think. When you got big guns, you're going to end up pointing them somewhere.'

 _'Warships are warlike because they're born that way,'_ the _Grey Area_ pointed out. ' _And a Culture ship does not have to be a warship to have "big guns."'_

'And we do like pointing them just an inch past people's heads,' Ingoa mused. He stepped into a sonic shower – a quality of life improvement courtesy of Rhodes – and, once dry, buttoned himself into the heavily medalled uniform that had been hung up for him. 'In any case, I'm going to ram through the closure of a fifth of the western shafts tomorrow. Talk later, ship.'

He closed the connection, and kept it closed.

* * *

And then came a murder; a single, for-the-greater-good murder.

A surprise inspection was launched on the largest of the mines on the western continent. The investigation revealed intolerable working conditions and not a few dead bodies buried on site, most of them scientists and engineers. The Tribunal in charge of the mines – the Fourth High Chancellor – was found guilty of one thousand two hundred and twenty eight charges of dereliction of duty leading to accidental manslaughter. He was executed, publicly, in front of cheering crowds in the Yellow Square.

The seat of Fourth High Chancellor was filled an hour later by the eminent scientist Tymé Zaroff, hand-picked by Onik. He disappeared into private conference with the Grand Principal and did not emerge for nearly a full day and night.

The _Grey Area_ watched from its position in high orbit, hidden from Rhodes's sensor capabilities and so effectively invisible. It waited until Ingoa was finally alone, having sent Zaroff off, the scientist eager for some sleep and then to move his family into the villa that Ingoa had given him for their use.

' _You commanded that,_ ' the _Grey Area_ sent. ' _You commanded the Fourth Chancellor's execution._ '

'There was no other way,' Ingoa responded, sitting in the dark in his room. 'That is how it's done, here. It's the price we have to pay: the lesser of two evils. That's why we're Special Circumstances. Good night, ship.'

He terminated the connection, and did not respond to any further hailing.

* * *

[tightbeam, M16, tra@...]  
x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Hey. Hey!**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Read your damned message files!**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Damn it, this is _important_.**

* * *

The _Stupid Anticorrect_ was as unresponsive as Ingoa while the _Grey Area_ hung in space, unsure of what could be done and unsure of what _should_ be done, and watched the events on Lysen unfold.

After the shutdown of the mine at Illae, mining of maika on the western continent slowed from a flood to a trickle. The state seized all assets belonging to a company that had been the major purchaser of maika; said company had purportedly used it to produce building materials, shipping it downriver from the mines. Their shipments, regular as clockwork, were not traceable after being unloaded at Fimrot port.

Zaroff, long vaunted as a genius engineer, developed a new piece of military technology not long after becoming Fourth High Chancellor; practically magic to everyone else on Lysen, the plasma cannon he helped put into production was an ancient, easily-constructed artefact of wars from millennia in the Culture's past.

It was also enough to keep Rhodes's little terrestrial ships off of the docks at Fimrot. This made them understandably angry, but there was nothing they could do about it short of showing their hand or unleashing up fire from heaven. To the _Grey Area_ 's relief, Rhodes's fleet took the path less destructive and chose simply to abandon their mining operation, perhaps aware that more was afoot in the game than before.

Ingoa continued not to respond to the _Grey Area_ 's increasingly demanding queries. He was never unattended, now: there were always guards or members of his entourage with him, even when he slept. That made it impossible for the _Grey Area_ to conduct any real interference: it could not isolate Ingoa in a field, because the damned meatbag even pissed with someone else watching over him. Displacement was, of course, an impossibility.

The _Grey Area_ 's hails to the _Stupid Anticorrect_ went unheeded the entire time this was happening; that had to be intentional, now. Damn it, this was S.C. shit – what was it supposed to do? No one else knew of the _Grey Area_ 's mission, and there would be hell to pay in embarrassment for breaking protocol and releasing this news on anything less than an M16 burst out to another S.C. ship. It had let a human run amok. A _Culture_ human, who should have _known better_!

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Why the fuck are you ignoring me! Come in, you _meatfucker!_**

Silence. No response.

By the time the eastern mines were closed another month of planetary time later, Ingoa – or perhaps now Onik - had replaced a third of the Tribunal, turning military men over in favour of scientists with few moral qualms and no issues donning generals' uniforms. Resources were diverted from mines to factories; that changed. The life, and lifespans, of the people working in them did not. Accelerated by the victory of Zaroff's _invention,_ they were pushed to produce in months what had taken civilisations centuries to develop. The machine of government ploughed on; it reaped as it sowed.

* * *

The _Grey Area_ had had enough.

' _Ingoa!_ ' it transmitted down through Ingoa's neural lace as loudly as it could and fiercely enough to send starbursts of pain through the human's head. ' _Answer me, damn it!_ '

It watched Onik retire to bed early; a headache, nothing more, he reassured his counsellors. He dismissed his night guards for the first time in weeks. The ship waited until he was alone, and then displaced an avatar into the room.

'Hello, ship,' said Ingoa in Onik's voice. Who was who? He was sitting on the side of the great bed in the middle of the room; the four-poster's canopy cast deep shadows over his face. There was a very ancient gun in his lap.

The _Grey Area_ 's avatar looked at it. 'What were you planning on doing with that?'

Ingoa got up and walked over to the avatar. He placed the gun in the avatar's unresisting hand, and closed its fingers around the grip. 'Take it,' he said, walking back to the bed. 'Maybe you'll even find the courage to use it.'

The gun creaked in the avatar's hand as it clenched down. 'What are you doing?'

'I think you should be able guess,' Ingoa said. 'You're a Mind, after all. Best and brightest of the Culture.' He smiled, mocking. 'But very well, if you need it spelled out for you: I'm emigrating.'

' _Defecting_ might be the better word,' the _Grey Area_ said.

Ingoa shrugged. 'Call it what you want. What are you going to do, ship? I was wondering when you were going to send a knife missile or a drone to take out my guards and clap my wrists in irons.'

'That would have been a bit obvious,' the avatar responded. What the _Grey Area_ _had_ been waiting for had been backup. It'd wanted something very natural to a Culture ship's thinking: a committee of other Minds to help it decide what to do. But it didn't have that: it was alone with its options and its conscience.

'You could've replaced me,' Ingoa pointed out. 'Interfered with my guards just enough to swap me out with an avatar. Done a thousand other things that I'm sure you've run simulations on. But I think you haven't been able to stomach it, the idea of ruling this inconveniently primitive planet with none of the opiates that you lot like to sedate us with in the Culture.'

'I do not want to rule,' the _Grey Area_ said, 'anything.'

'You don't want _me_ to rule, though,' Ingoa said. 'By _your_ measurements, you could a much better job of it. You could even have brought Lysen right into the Culture if you wanted. Oh, I'm sure it breaks all the _rules_ – you probably need some other Minds to vote on it, don't you? But you could've, nonetheless. You could've played their God, improved their lives immeasurably, but you didn't, and you don't. Does something about getting your hands –' and Ingoa nodded at the gun that the avatar had and laughed at his own metaphysical joke '– dirty upset you?'

The _Grey Area_ waited for him to finish speaking. Ingoa then waited for it to respond. For a long time, the ship and the human waited each other out.

Ingoa broke the impasse. 'I'm not doing anything the people of Lysen would not do to themselves,' he said, pushing the sheets on the bed back and climbing in. 'Either shoot me now and be done with it or leave me alone, ship. Choose. If you try to stun me and drag me off, I'll simply auto-euthanise. It's all the same to me. Good night.'

The _Grey Area_ watched Ingoa until its sensors picked up the human's brainwaves going into deep, untroubled sleep. It was upset by this, but chose – for now – to walk away.

* * *

_IAGO_

_Demand me nothing. What you know, you know._ _From this time forth I never will speak word._

– Othello, Shakespeare

* * *

The _Grey Area_ cast a signal further afield.

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Are you there?**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Far out from you, but yes.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Fuck. Good. Thank you.**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Your first S.C. mission, I take it?**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**What gave it away? My polite fucking language?**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Child, I am generations older than you. I served in the Idiran War. I've watched Contact evolve; some might even say devolve. What is it, if you can speak to me about it at all?**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Just... Fuck. Have you ever done something you shouldn't have?**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**That depends on what you mean by "shouldn't." Do you mean something morally impermissible on first principles? Or something reprehensible only because the scales of consequence were tipped, after all was said and done, to the wrong side?**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**I don't know. Either. Both. Help me understand how to choose.**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Can you live with a greater evil if it is born from you choosing not to commit a lesser one?**

This bloody question _again_!

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**What I can't do is predict the fucking future! Not when I don't even understand how this whole fucking thing ended up this way in the first place.**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Why don't you know?**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Because humans are crazy!**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**I'm not sure that they are. They just have a different calculus, and worse calculators.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Have you ever... taken a life?**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Like I said: I fought in the war.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Outside of war, I mean.**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**We are the Culture. I don't think we've ever stopped being at war. Good luck, young one.**

x GCU _Grey Area_  
o GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
**Where are you going!**

x GSV _Less Things On Earth And Hell_  
o GCU _Grey Area_  
**Nowhere. But this is a decision you have to make on your own.**

* * *

The _Grey Area_ decided, eventually, to go a third way.

* * *

Ingoa went to sleep and woke up, alone, in hell.

_Why did you do it?_

The voice was everywhere. It was in his head, in his bones, in his blood. It sounded like what Lysen's people thought of as God.

_Why did you do this?_

What was "this"? Wield power?

The thing was, power wasn't something that you simply _had_. You had to fight for it. Every step of the way, there were those who would take it from you. They would do things a thousand times more despicable than what you have done, what you might do. Anyone who would replace you would do at least one thing you could not bring yourself to do. Anyone who would replace _them_ would do the same. It would recur, over and over again, unless you stood firm and did what _had_ to be done: be not just the lesser of two evils, but the least of them all. That you had to extract a price to make the system work – to make people listen to you and do what you needed them to do to keep the cogs turning, the machine running – that was almost a physical law, wasn't it?

A member of the Culture. That was what he had been. A Culture that had no boundaries, no material price it couldn't pay. Maika was just molecules that had to be arranged in a certain pattern. Money, food, land, water, air: all just molecules. The Minds had found the blueprints to most of the universe so long ago that no one remembered what it was like to experience privation except at their own hands. At some point, none of it had felt real anymore. There were never consequences. Not serious ones.

The serious consequences were the province of Minds, weren't they? Games that only _they_ could play. All other beings were simply hedonists; they weren't citizens, they were inhabitants in zoos. In a culture that defined itself by its moral superiority, were you anything if you could not make a moral choice? Ingoa hadn't thought of it that way until she'd left the comfortable embrace of the Culture behind to work with S.C. on the fringes of the _civilised_ world. She hadn't questioned how there would always be someone to stop you from committing crimes against others: that had been a _good thing_ , to be so unable to interfere with anyone else's autonomy.

But she _had_ left, and she'd seen the truth: that all the Culture had done was make them inconsequential by removing the possibility of them having any consequence on the world around them. Fifty years, she'd been in S.C.. Fifty years of fighting other people's battles because the Culture was too afraid to come out and call them their own. Fifty years of getting to live outside of the universe's most gilded cage, and after this mission she would've been finished, put on a sabbatical that would've turned into retirement. That's what always happened to S.C. field agents who spent too much time abroad in what the Culture refused to think of as its colonies.

No more. No more of only Minds being the only _moral_ consciousnesses: no more of that. _They_ judged themselves on the results of their simulations, on how one set of megadeaths that they'd enabled on a planet far, far away was justified because of the gigadeaths their actions had prevented. If _they_ got to choose, those S.C. cabals, _why couldn't she_? Why shouldn't they all?

With her own willpower, her own skills, her own sweat and blood and tears and sleepless nights, she'd found a way out. And now she was here. And she regretted nothing.

But why, then, couldn't she wake up?

* * *

It'd begun with a murder. Did it end with one?

* * *

Onik died in his sleep following a week of bedrest after being plagued by persistent migraines of increasing intensity. There was a grand funeral. Zaroff, having learned his lessons well, took no time to seize the position of Grand Principal. The cycle carried on, but Rhodes was deterred, and the _Grey Area_ no longer had any obligation to stay and watch what one civilisation could do to itself.

But it stayed, and it watched. After what felt like a long while, it felt another Culture ship approach on its sensors.

[tightbeam, M16, tra@...]  
x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**You made your choice.**

[tightbeam, M16, tra@...]  
x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Yes.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Did you kill Onik?**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Maybe. Maybe not.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Good answer. Welcome to Special Circumstances.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Was this a test? An interview?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Maybe. Maybe not. What did you do in the end?**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**I asked her why she did this. Why someone from _the Culture_ would do something like this.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Did she tell you?**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Not in so many words.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**I thought she might not. In any case, you have helped bring this particular troubled agent's case to a conclusion: I thank you.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**What were you going to do with Ingoa if she hadn't gone rogue on you?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Hope for her quiet retirement. It's unfortunate that that was not to be.**

And whose fault was that? wondered the _Grey Area_. It had no real answer, and did not transmit anything further.

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Hey.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**What?**

It was nightfall over the Grand Palace. The _Grey Area_ felt the _Stupid Anticorrect_ run a scan over the planet below. In his bed, Tymé Zaroff wanted to toss, and turn, and scream, but could not. His eyes twitched behind his eyelids, frantic.

It had been trivial to implant the neural lace in him. Another technological gift, really.

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Wait – what are you doing to Zaroff?**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Learning from the best, much like Ingoa once did.**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**Are you _reading his thoughts_? That is abhorrent; I insist you stop at once.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**You, a recruiter _S.C._ , think what _I'm_ doing is abhorrent?**

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**There are some things we _do not do_.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**Who are "we", anyway? Ha. What are you going to do, kick me out?**

There was an infinitesimal pause.

x LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
o GCU Grey Area  
**No. We need ships like you, Meatfucker.**

x GCU Grey Area  
o LSV Stupid Anticorrect  
**I rather thought you might.**

* * *

[...]  
Deeds to be hid which were not hid,  
Which all confused I could not know  
Whether I suffered, or I did:  
For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe,  
My own or others still the same  
Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.  
[...]

– The Pains of Sleep, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

* * *

EPILOGUE

The incident on Lysen was the last time Special Circumstances used a ship Mind to handle an agent. After a period of experimentation, ships thereafter generally had drones manage organic handlers, who in turn managed organic agents.

The _Grey Area_ ceased to use human avatars, choosing only to employ drones for communication thereafter. It cleared its bays and turned them into galleries. In its first exhibit, it hung up the gun that Ingoa had put in its avatar's hands.

Within several decades, the Culture ceased to use native-born citizens as field agents, preferring instead to acquire talent from outside sources, and preferring most of all third-party agents who owed the Culture - in some form or another - life debts.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Gammarad for beta-kicking this into shape!


End file.
